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Comment by teej | Hacker News Reader

Toyota ran an anti-distracted driving radio ad where they did this. The ad narrator says "Hey Siri, please turn airplane mode on." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqZBVTMrgFA

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Similarly, I recall an Xbox One commercial with Aaron Paul which ended in him jumping onto his sofa and saying "Xbox on!"

...you can figure out what happened to anyone who already owned an Xbox One.

Xbox shut off trolling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuGDhZorlQ0

That actually seems kind of dangerous. It could cause people to pull out their phones to check whether the ad actually turned airplane mode on.

Doesn't she say something about "okay, turning off" when that happens?

If you watch the video you see that the ad actually answers the warning prompt with "Yes" as well.

siri has itself trained to a single user's voice. I've never had anyone else's voice activate my phone with "Hey Siri". Admittedly, it usually takes me saying "Hey Siri" 3 times before it recognizes my voice, but I'm 100% certain a radio ad would get no response from my phone.

Just want to chime in and say that I can activate my girlfriends iPhone by saying "Hey Siri" in a girly sounding voice. It's trained to only her voice but I can trigger it. So it's not foolproof as you make it seem.

My wife's phone regularly (maybe once a month), starts listening in response to me saying something, which isn't even "Hey Siri", despite never training with my voice. My voice does not sound anything like my wife's.

So, I think the error rate is simply not low enough to make conclusive claims about what it might or might not do.

Better stock up on those tinfoils.

It happens to me many times a day. I've b come acutely aware of how much I question other people because it activates when I say "Are you serious?"

Siri is definitely not trained to a single voice. And yes, the car radio can turn it on. I've had a podcast discussion of Siri trigger it. It became such a joke that some podcasters have another phrase they say when they mean "hey Siri".

Since the iPhone 6S, Hey Siri is activated by a dedicated chip in the SoC. This enables low-power real-time detection of trigger words. Before, Hey Siri only worked with phones in the process of charging, because it was done with software, so a lot less efficient.

These voice-activated chips can be trained (as seen in a lot of other phones), but I'm not sure the software-powered Siri can be trained.

"Trained" is a bit of a joke with voice-activation. I've never seen it matter in practice.

I think Google does for android. I often ask "wake me up in 15 minutes". I've seen the phone write 50 and immediately switch to 15.

trained to a particular voice ~= trained to a user's preferences!

Doesn't "trained" in the context of voice recognition mean something more like "better able to understand your voice" and not "able to exclude other voices."

As a sample of the alternate term, Merlin Mann's assorted podcasts generally use "Ahoy Telephone."

It has only been a feature since iOS 9: http://9to5mac.com/2015/09/11/os-9-siri-voice-recognition-tr...

I have an acquaintance by the name of Siri, hilarity ensues.

It would only work if the iPhone was plugged into power AND they had turned on the capability for Siri to be activated by voice, which is limited to when the iPhone is plugged in.

I know Android users might not understand this limitation, but there it is.

The iPhone 6s, and the Apple Watch, are always listening (if enabled) for "Hey Siri", even on battery.

Fuck that shut.

If airplane mode is turned on and my GPS disabled as I'm close to the my right turn you better believe I'll be distracted.

A better solution would be a true hands free mode that prevented touch input from working while driving.

Does airplane mode disable the GPS? GPS is a passive receiving of radiowaves, so I'm guessing not?

(according to Apple, prior to 8.2 it did turn it off. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204234)

Directions require more than your satellite coordinates. Map services are frequently polling servers for traffic conditions, new tiles for the map, and so on. You'd hope that these can fall back gracefully but I wouldn't put it past them to not. If you activate airplane mode and disable your phone's cellular connection, even if your phone doesn't disable the GPS receiver, directions may stop working.

Works fine on my Android. I regularly lose cellular reception in the mountains, and it continues to work. Sometimes the tiles are low-res, but still readable. I would expect Apple would design around the same contingency, along with poor cellular service along more remote areas of the Interstate.

Android allows you to pre-save areas for offline use also, not sure if Apple does that. I don't have a mobile data plan on my phone, so if I need navigation, I just save the map area before I get off WiFi.

They do, although in my experience Google Maps is better at this. I actually find Apple Maps to be perfectly usable for everything, but always use Google Maps for directions to the boonies if I'm going hiking or something -- it's much better at caching tiles and keeping them around for directions back once I'm out there as well.

Yes offline maps is nice but the infuriating limitation is that it will save map tiles but not locations or areas that I've saved in "My Maps". One would expect a couple of coordinates to require much less storage than a bunch of map tiles...

There's almost no such thing as a passive radio anymore... superheterodyne receivers are the norm now and they contain a local oscillator that can leak back out into the airwaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheterodyne_receiver

Waze has a prompt that asks if you're a passenger while in motion for precisely this reason.

Haha, watching the ad reminds me of the HAL shutdown scene from Space Odyssey

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"

reminds me of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R22WNkYKeo8

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